by PhilipJ on 3 October 2006

If you have a headache and take a drug to block the pain, you’ll notice that the effects of the drug wear off in a few hours. This happens because you have a powerful detoxification system that finds unusual chemicals, like drugs, and flushes them out of your body. This system fights all sorts of unpleasant chemicals that we eat and breathe, including drugs, poisonous compounds in plants, carcinogens formed during cooking, and environmental pollutants. The cytochrome p450 enzymes are our first line of defense in this chemical battle.

The cytochrome p450 enzymes find unusual molecules and add oxygen atoms to them. In most cases, this has the effect of making the molecule more soluble in water, and thus, easier to flush out of the body. The added oxygen also provides a ready handle for other detoxifying enzymes to take hold and further modify, and destroy, these toxic molecules. This task of adding oxygen is chemically tricky, and cytochrome p450 enzymes use a powerful molecular tool to perform the reaction: an iron atom in a heme group.